


all there is left to you

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, F/M, Post-Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20233948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: She hadn’t been there. Anakin had.





	all there is left to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).

> This story assumes Mandalore didn't happen. Thank you for the fascinating prompt!

She was only here because he’d lost everything. Her Anakin, who’d let her go for her own sake, now suffered alone. 

But he looked different, or maybe she was paying more attention. She saw the anger he’d once warned her against indulging—though she remembered too when Obi-Wan had faked his death, the vengeance they had both allowed to fuel them, and the betrayal he’d kept at a simmering heat long after he’d returned to smiling and laughing with his master. 

She’d known that he wasn’t made for peace even as they fought for it. But the war had seemed like it would never end for them, and they were suited to it. More than any Jedi should be. Barriss, then, had a point in her condemnation of their path. 

Did her master? The war had darkened the Jedi. The Jedi were no longer Jedi. Neither was she. 

“You were wrong. It wasn’t yourself you couldn’t trust. It was them.” He pressed his face against her cheek, held her close. 

Ahsoka thought of the deaths she’d sensed across the Galaxy. She hadn’t been there. Anakin had. He had personally witnessed the Jedi betray the Republic, he had lost his wife in the tumult, his best friend in the sudden turn of the war. Rex went missing in action in the chaos. The empty space where he, Padmé and Obi-Wan had been, already mourned as part of her new life, gaped more widely with Anakin’s news. 

He had asked her to come back, not as a Jedi, but as a friend. She understood keeping close in a time of disaster. She understood that this time, he needed her to take care of him; it was the closest he’d ever come to saying so. For that alone, she listened. She raised her arms to hold him in return, felt the solid stability of him in a galaxy that had once again come to seem very different from the one she’d thought she’d known. 

He never called for her on his hunts. Ahsoka had asked; he’d surprised her one day, as he returned from one. It had been a long time since they’d fought side by side. She chafed at her duty leading the troopers in Coruscant. She worried over him, who’d always relied on one partner or another. His desire to protect her made less sense than ever—she was at her strongest, and he must be missing someone to fight with him. Mindful of privacy, and the galaxy’s eyes on them, she waited until he was in his rooms. She laid a hand on his shoulder. 

Anakin accepted it, but his look as he raised his eyes to hers was unreadable. He was brooding again. As if in waiting for her response, he expected something. She couldn’t be sure of what. 

She was the only one he could trust. She was the only one he could leave his empire to: its steward and heir. He didn’t relax until she told him she understood, until she sat beside him and, his arm thrown around her neck, leaned her head against his shoulder. He let her fall asleep there; when she woke, she wondered if he’d rested at all. He was watching her, and squeezed her tight to his side. 

The first time she found him out, she discovered he’d killed children, and he knocked her unconscious. That in itself was an answer, and the second time. She’d heard rumors, dismissed them as the sort of cruelty the galaxy had passed for gossip throughout the entirety of the war. She’d spoken with the soldiers, though. They still talked to her, as if she had not stopped being Jedi and they had not become Jedi killers. She sensed their unease, heard of their nightmares, felt them as she offered her power to soothe. She looked to Anakin, not believing what she knew, and he made her give credit to it. 

Ahsoka regained consciousness in her room, the Force dampened as she lay stretched out, cuffed at the wrists and ankles in her own bed. Anakin loomed above her with yellow eyes, looking frightened and, though she couldn’t extend her senses to detect his feelings, angrier for it; that much, she thought, hadn’t changed. That was the detail which had changed everything else, shaded his every move since he’d brought her back to him. 

His hand clenched into a fist—her throat ached with the memory—but he made no further attack on her. 

Instead, she listened, wishing to be numb. Perhaps that was how he felt. As if he wanted to drown the contradiction of his emotions in a singular feeling, and he’d chosen his rage. Ahsoka had known, but she had not understood. 

He was, at last, letting her in. He’d made a captive audience of her, at a moment in which she wouldn’t have chosen to run if her limbs had been free. She realized, then, that he did not understand. He wouldn’t let himself, anymore than he had when she’d left him in what felt like another life. He would keep her, or hurt her, or maybe both; he would not see outside his own fear, would not take the chance—which she now knew he felt as a certainty—that she would leave again if the choice were hers. 

In effect, this time Anakin was making the choice for her. 

Ahsoka had been right, to think he’d wanted her to be there for him. But he hadn’t let her, for as long as she’d been here. He still wasn’t. 

After he spent himself in raving, looking in vain for a response—the one he wanted and must know she couldn’t give him, the one he wouldn’t trust if she could bring herself to lie—he left her in silence. 

She dreamed that he came to sleep on her shoulder, to tell her again the story he’d been hiding for longer than she’d known him, and let her forgive him freely, her hands on his back. He let them start again. 

She woke, still cuffed. She took advantage of the time to think. 

Whether she ran or stayed, there would be no turning back. If she ran she must fight; she didn’t know that she could. Ahsoka tried to picture herself lifting her sabers to him in earnest, and dread curled in her stomach. It was a corner she would not back herself into. 

She’d lost everything. Ahsoka had nothing more to risk except her life, and she had long been willing to give it.


End file.
